Bumping into God

We are a curious lot, we humans. We name and label and categorize and
delineate. We box in our beliefs, and box out those who differ. We fill
in the blanks and fill out the forms and try to squeeze the rhythms of
life into measuring cups.

But none of us knows what life, or being, is, let alone non-being. We can
go to the cusp of tomorrow, but never beyond. We can pore over the
ashes of yesterday but stumble against the edges of prehistory. We
create illusory maps of how the world works, but there are places on the
map of being that we fear to visit.

Those places, before birth and after death, live on the
borders of insanity. We don't want to go there, because they are out
of our control. Time is an untranslated language there. There the
chaotic world of nature won't fit into our charts. What if we found –
there - that the Universe is God's epileptic seizure? What if She never
recovers?

Being, is totally out of our control. Except, of course, that, being
consummate war-mongers, we have finely honed the skills necessary
to turn our fellow-creatures into non-beings. That makes us the smart
ones, right? That puts us right up there with God, right?

In a poem entitled “Peace”, Stanley Moss wrote, “The trade of war is
over, there are no more battles, but simple murder is still in”. We are
into and out of many things, as fashion and the whims of politics
dictate: hip hop, abstract expressionism, sports heroes, uppers and
downers, long hair and short skirts. Are we
really “in” to murder? Is conflict built into our DNA?

A friend sent me these words by Saint Augustine:
“Imagine if all the tumult of the body were to quiet down, along with
our busy thoughts. Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still.
And imagine if that moment were to go on and on.”
I would dearly love to imagine that moment. I would especially like to
see our leaders in Congress participate in that moment. As James
Bovard said, writing in the Sacramento Bee, “Democracy must be
something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have
for dinner.” Are we, as he says, victims of “Battered Citizen Syndrome”?

It is not the beyond of tomorrow or the before of yesterday that should
concern us. It's today's humans, being, that have spun out of control.